Atheist IQ Scam Pat 2

As we saw last time the IQ figures don't support the thesis. The studies that supported the thesis that atheists are more intelligent merer all (but one) done before 1969. There 6 that supported the thesis and 17 agaisnt it. The 17 were divided between showing religious people are smarter or no correlation. The Negative studies all had better designs and larger samples. There are many other reasons to expose the IQ scam as a lie and a farce and a, well, you know....scam.

First of all there are many experts and educators who are now even willing to question the idea that IQ is even a meaningful measurement of intelligence. This is actually quoted by an atheist who is questioning the findings. He get's it from Leadership University but the guy he's quoting is immanent in scinece (Fritz Schaffer):

First - In a lecture by Fritz Shafer from a website by Leadership University:http://www.leaderu.com/realri9501/bingbang2.html
and http://www.ascd.org/readingroom/edlead/9903/extpopham.h...
"Recent thinking among many leading educators suggests that there are various forms of intelligence, not just one (Gardner, 1994). A child who is born with less aptitude for dealing with quantitative or verbal tasks, therefore, might possess greater "interpersonal" or "intrapersonal" intelligence, but these latter abilities are not tested by these tests. For the kinds of items that are most commonly found on standardized achievement tests, children differ in their innate abilities to respond correctly. And some items on standardized achievement tests are aimed directly at measuring such intellectual ability."

Another atheist group that doesn't buy the ideology finds alternatives to IQ as a measure of intelligence. From atheist NEUS a community of non theists.

Dissatisfaction with traditional IQ tests has led to the development of alternative theories, all of which suggest that intelligence is the result of independent abilities that contribute to human performance. In 1983, Howard Gardner proposed the theory of multiple intelligences, which claims a broadening of the conventional definition of intelligence is needed, since, if intelligence is defined as the cognitive or mental capacity of an individual, this would logically include all forms of mental qualities, not simply the ones most transparent to standardized I.Q. tests. The categories of intelligences Gardner proposes are logical, linguistic, spatial, musical, kinesthetic, naturalist, intrapersonal and interpersonal intelligences.

Jean Piaget developed stages as an alternative to IQ after studying the nature of the wrong answers on items. The Model of hierarchical complexity was formed as an alternative to IQ. Performance on the items varying in hierarchical complexity from 0 to 14, is absolute, and does not require norms. Because the orders are content and context free, they can be used to measure performance in any domain, including the ones mention by Gardner and Goleman.

 All of their links go to Wikipedia.


He questions the issues about profession:

But I do like the implication of the recent "IQ Studies Show Christians Intellectually Inferior To Atheists" DU post that we must assume that scientist are the most intelligent people. It couldn't be that more materialistically inclined people go into science because they are attracted to the naturalistic thinking, the reductionism, and because it supports their ideological views? No of course not, scientists are just the only intelligent people! What about historians? What percentage of historians are believers? OR artists, poets, English professors, why can't they be intelligent? Because they don't control things and play with numbers! Because science is the atheist er zotz religion that protects him from God so naturally he thinks that the scientist is like a priest of his er zots religion! In reality of course scientists are not the only intelligent people, and it makes more sense that the more intelligent religious people would go into theology or something related. He doesn't even bother to study that, that would be a biased group (of course science isn't'!??). If he studied theologians I bet he would find the incidence of smart practitioners who believe in God going way way up! (Ibid)

He also points out what I have on my Doxa pages half of all Americans with advanced degrees in scinece are religious: "The scientific fraternity conducted a poll and found that on any given Sunday 46% of Ph.D. holders in science can be found in church. That compares with 47% for the general population (in Alan Lightman Origins: The Lives and World of Modern Cosmologists (Harvard University press, 1999)."

The intelligentsia (Professors) are  religious

Gallup surveys found show that "professors are almost as likely to express a belief in God as are Americans as a whole." (1997 N.Y. Times News Service). A more recent study that was much more in depth supports very similar conclusions. Neil Gross (Harvard) and Solon Simmons (George Mason)

 Minding the Campus

The study of 1500 college professors at twenty top institutions that grant bachelors degrees, conducted by Neil Gross (Harvard) and Solon Simmons (George Mason), did indeed find that a slight majority claims to be religious. The numbers, not listed in the Sun, showed that 35.7 percent say "I know God really exists and I have no doubt about it," while 16.9 percent reported "while I have my doubts, I feel I do believe in God." Atheists and agnostics accounted for 23.4 percent of professors reporting. The most heavily religious professors in the study teach accounting, followed by professors of elementary education, finance, marketing, art and criminal justice. The least religious professors were in biology, psychology, economics, political science and computer science. Research-oriented professors and faculty at elite institutions are significantly less religious than other academics. Only twenty percent of these academics "have no doubt that God exists." The implications for the larger culture of these findings are crucial. Professors who are the least religious and most hostile to religion are the ones most likely to be writing textbooks, articles and monographs, and the ones whose opinions are most sought after by the media. It is these ideas of irreligious professors that carry the most prestige among the punditocracy, dominate elite discourse, and filter down to the general public. Liberal arts professors are much less likely than accounting professors to believe in God. The liberal arts and social science professors are the ones who most often express opinions on religion and deal with issues involving religion and morality in the classroom.

The pie chart at the top is a graphic depicting the findings of that very study. The most heavily religious in the study were marketing and criminal justice, the least were biology, psychology and computer science. The atheist spread is a litter in elite research universities but still not that from 50-50. Of the elites who teach graduate students in elite research institutions about 36% atheist or agnostic,33% believe in God, 27% believe in a higher power of some kind. So when we take them all the believers together that's actually 60% not atheist, who are willing to believe in God in some sense.

 Don't think the really intellectual professors are all atheists and the business professors and athletics coaches are the theists. One of the major atheist philosophers affirms that his discipline has been taken over by theists.

The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967. It became apparent to the philosophical profession that this book displayed that realist theists were not outmatched by naturalists in terms of the most valued standards of analytic philosophy: conceptual precision, rigor of argumentation, technical erudition, and an in-depth defense of an original world-view. This book, followed seven years later by Plantinga’s even more impressive book, The Nature of Necessity, made it manifest that a realist theist was writing at the highest qualitative level of analytic philosophy, on the same playing field as Carnap, Russell, Moore, Grünbaum, and other naturalists. Realist theists, whom hitherto had segregated their academic lives from their private lives, increasingly came to believe (and came to be increasingly accepted or respected for believing) that arguing for realist theism in scholarly publications could no longer be justifiably regarded as engaging in an “academically unrespectable” scholarly pursuit.

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians. Although many theists do not work in the area of the philosophy of religion, so many of them do work in this area that there are now over five philosophy journals devoted to theism or the philosophy of religion, such as Faith and Philosophy, Religious Studies, International Journal of the Philosophy of Religion, Sophia, Philosophia Christi, etc. Philosophia Christi began in the late 1990s and already is overflowing with submissions from leading philosophers. Can you imagine a sizeable portion of the articles in contemporary physics journals suddenly presenting arguments that space and time are God’s sensorium (Newton’s view) or biology journals becoming filled with theories defending élan vital or a guiding intelligence? Of course, some professors in these other, non-philosophical, fields are theists; for example, a recent study indicated that seven percent of the top scientists are theists.[1] However, theists in other fields tend to compartmentalize their theistic beliefs from their scholarly work; they rarely assume and never argue for theism in their scholarly work. If they did, they would be committing academic suicide or, more exactly, their articles would quickly be rejected, requiring them to write secular articles if they wanted to be published. If a scientist did argue for theism in professional academic journals, such as Michael Behe in biology, the arguments are not published in scholarly journals in his field (e.g., biology), but in philosophy journals (e.g., Philosophy of Science and Philo, in Behe’s case). But in philosophy, it became, almost overnight, “academically respectable” to argue for theism, making philosophy a favored field of entry for the most intelligent and talented theists entering academia today. A count would show that in Oxford University Press’ 2000–2001 catalogue, there are 96 recently published books on the philosophy of religion (94 advancing theism and 2 presenting “both sides”). By contrast, there are 28 books in this catalogue on the philosophy of language, 23 on epistemology (including religious epistemology, such as Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief), 14 on metaphysics, 61 books on the philosophy of mind, and 51 books on the philosophy of science.

And how have naturalist philosophers reacted to what some committed naturalists might consider as “the embarrassment” of belonging to the only academic field that has allowed itself to lose the secularization it once had? Some naturalists wish to leave the field, considering themselves as no longer doing “philosophy of mind,” for example, but instead “cognitive science.” But the great majority of naturalist philosophers react by publicly ignoring the increasing desecularizing of philosophy (while privately disparaging theism, without really knowing anything about contemporary analytic philosophy of religion) and proceeding to work in their own area of specialization as if theism, the view of approximately one-quarter or one-third of their field, did not exist. (The numbers “one-quarter” and “one-third” are not the result of any poll, but rather are the exceptionless, educated guesses of every atheist and theist philosophy professor I have asked [the answers varied between “one-quarter” and “one-third”]). Quickly, naturalists found themselves a mere bare majority, with many of the leading thinkers in the various disciplines of philosophy, ranging from philosophy of science (e.g., Van Fraassen) to epistemology (e.g., Moser), being theists. The predicament of naturalist philosophers is not just due to the influx of talented theists, but is due to the lack of counter-activity of naturalist philosophers themselves. God is not “dead” in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.(by Quentin Smith The Meta philosophy of NaturalismOriginally Published in: Philo: A Journal of Philosophy, Volume 4, Number 2).